The Anglobitch Thesis contends that the brand of feminism that arose in the Anglosphere (the English-speaking world) in the 1960s has an ulterior misandrist (anti-male) agenda quite distinct from its self-proclaimed role as ‘liberator’ of women.

Saturday, 31 July 2010

A general distinction has arisen in pan-Anglosphere masculinism. The British wing of masculinism is strong on theory while the American wing is much stronger on practice. This is what we might expect, given the different intellectual traditions of the two nations. America’s great contribution to intellectual life is the pragmatist philosophical movement, while Britain is renowned for inventing things (computers and jet engines, for instance) but failing to capitalise on them. In short, Britain is theory-rich, practice-poor. The British theoretical approach seems very popular with Americans, who perhaps need some conceptual guidance for their practical efforts. However, I have noticed a key problem in the British ‘theoretical’ masculinist movement that may cause untold damage if it continues unchecked: knee-jerk adherence to 'conservatism'.

Certain masculinists are obsessed with trying to reprise traditional Anglo-Saxon values as an antidote to feminism. But – and this is the really, really important thing to grasp – in Anglo-Saxon countries, traditional values ARE the source of feminism. This is because ‘traditional’ Anglo culture is puritanical, demonizing all men as sexual beings. Because women are comparatively frigid and denatured, Anglo culture unthinkingly places them on pedestals, however they act. We see this endlessly played out in American court-rooms, where decent men are fleeced of their wealth and children by husband-beaters and adulteresses on a daily basis.

Anglo feminism is a fearful hybrid, crossing women’s rights with puritanical repression and producing women with vast power sans all responsibility. Given this background, we can see quite plainly why resurrecting traditional Anglo-Saxon values can only strengthen feminism. Anglo feminism expresses Anglo culture – repressive, puritanical and hypocritical. Modern feminism is not progressive, in the least. Its assumptions are essentially Victorian, decrying virility and sexual freedom at every turn.

Devastating proof of this can be seen in Prime Minister David Cameron’s limp-dicked retreat on the thorny issue of male anonymity in heterosexual rape cases. Doctor Snark and other ‘conservative’ British masculinists were excited by Cameron’s promise to grant anonymity to the accused, not just the accuser. They assumed that a ‘conservative’ would uphold men’s rights and freedoms.

None of it!

Cameron immediately crumpled before rabid feminist and man-hater Harriet Harman, reformulating the Bill to only grant anonymity until trial. More worrying still, Cameron has pledged more (yet more!) support for female rape 'victims'.

From the standpoint of the Anglobitch thesis, this craven capitulation to misandrist feminism is entirely predictable. In the Anglosphere, ‘tradition’ means repression and, in the end, repression maintains Anglo feminism. Consequently, Anglo ‘traditions’ can only worsen the male situation in the Anglosphere. Yet conservative masculinists persist in trying to resurrect the repressive values that brought us to this desperate pass in the first place.

The same problem inheres to the new discipline of Male Studies, which emphasizes the innate differences between the sexes. While such differences surely exist, without challenging the default contempt for masculinity implicit in Anglo culture such an enterprise is pointless. Men and women are different... well, so what? Most smart people have worked that out by age twelve. Unless Male Studies frees masculinity from its strait-jacket of misandrist contempt, it is a pointless discipline. Indeed, emphasising innate gender differences without reversing the Anglosphere’s default misandry could well be dangerous, legitimizing the further marginalisation of men and boys. This is another variant of the ‘conservative problem’ implicit in Anglo-Saxon masculinism – extolling Anglo tradition merely defends feminist misandry, since traditional Anglo Puritanism promotes feminism by default.

Male Studies can discuss hormonal, physical and genetic differences between the sexes until Doomsday (probably adding little beyond Professor Glenn Wilson’s superb The Great Sex Divide) but if masculine virtues remain reviled by the parent culture, such discussion might merely advance feminist misandry. After all, Anglo feminists frequently invoke innate differences to explain their greater sociality and emotionalism. Male studies will subliminally promote the same misandrist agenda unless masculinity is seen as virtuous. Its apologists cannot perceive this danger because they are mostly soft scientists (anthropologists and psychologists) with little grasp of ideological conflict.

Let us turn now to the true origins of Anglo feminism’s intellectual ancestry. Throughout conservative MRA writings we find an obsession with Marxism and a callow conflation of Marxism with Anglo-American radicalism. This has gone unchallenged for far too long. Marxism has an intellectual heritage quite distinct from Anglo-American radicalism and cannot be simplistically conflated with it.

Marxism hails from the German-speaking world, being derived from Hegel’s metaphysics. Broadly speaking, Hegel thought that history unfolded towards a state of social enlightenment (which he believed was the nineteenth century Prussian state). In sum, his ideas were not leftist or liberal at all – fascists admire Hegel just as much as Marx did. Marx simply transferred Hegel’s concepts into the socio-economic sphere. He believed that socio-economic classes (defined by their relationship to the economic means of production) underwent a similar process of historical development, with capitalism yielding to communism - a society without classes where all were valued equally. At first the State (echoes of Hegel’s authoritarianism) would have to 'manage' this Communist utopia. Eventually it would ‘wither away’ however, leaving humanity in an eternally benign condition.

At first glance, these ideas are quite alien to the Anglo-American intellectual tradition. For Hegel and Marx, the individual is subsumed in collective waves of social change like a leaf in a storm. In short, Marxism is intellectually Germanic, with an ‘organic’ view of humanity that completely denies individualism and private property. One thinks of Nazi marches and Prussian military schools, not the Alamo or an English village pub. This is because Anglo-American radicalism follows a very distinct line of descent from Marxism. What is that heritage and how did it shape feminism?

Long before Marx and Hegel (1215, actually), the English barons made King John sign the Magna Carta, forcing him to acknowledge the innate rights and freedoms of the English people. In the Seventeenth Century, the English beheaded King Charles I for transgressing those freedoms. A century later, the fledgling United States won its independence from the British crown. In sum, the English-speaking world has an autonomous radical tradition quite independent of Marxism and antedating it by centuries.

In the nineteenth century, Anglo radicalism re-emerged as Christian socialism, especially in Britain. In the States it resurfaced as the temperance movement. Of course, the association between Puritanism and radicalism has always existed – consider Cromwell’s repressive Commonwealth, or the Pilgrim Fathers. Much more importantly, feminism also arose in that turbulent era. It was not new, nor was it Marxist; its origins can be traced back to the very origins of the anglosphere. And from the get-go, it embodied the inhuman loathing of sex and pleasure that has long marred Anglo culture.

The sickly repression of the Victorians cohered with radical feminism to produce a ‘women’s movement’ more intent on suppressing masculinity, virility and pleasure than advancing women’s rights – a crabbed agenda still characteristic of Anglo feminism today. Indeed, contemporary feminist hysteria against (largely imaginary) sex trafficking, prostitution, pornography and other legitimate forms of sensual expression could well come from the Victorian era (in fact, I aver that they do!).

So we are back to our principal theme, that Anglo culture is inherently misandrist and matriarchal by virtue of its Puritanism. Marxism is irrelevant to the issue - repressive Anglo radicalism gave birth to feminism, not Marx or Hegel. That tradition has an admirable love of liberty. Crossed with Puritan feminism, however, it became the curse of the Anglosphere. As ever, Anglo repression sickens all it touches.

In conclusion, only a total redefinition of Anglo culture will permit coherent resistance to Anglo-American feminism. Invoking ‘traditional’ Anglo values can lead only to defeat for the pan-Anglosphere men’s movement. A better alternative is a new, revolutionary agenda that severs all links with Anglo Puritanism. ‘Conservatism’ has failed us utterly, as David Cameron has demonstrated.

Having worked hard on this peerless piece, I feel all readers should profit from my pain. Let all readers (official and otherwise;-)) enjoy a fresh young whore this very week. Wherever you walk in the Anglosphere or the world, whatever your mood or pleasure, have this one on me. In one fell swoop you assail feminism, mock repression, strengthen the male position and make me very, very happy.

Saturday, 10 July 2010

This article appeared on Monsieur Chauvin's inactive blog. Superbly written and with many scholarly allusions, it ably discusses the intimate relationship between Anglo-Saxon sexual repression and strident Anglobitch feminism. Anglo puritanism permitted the rise of 'companionate marriage' which set women atop pedestals and allowed the 'rights plus privileges' agenda to triumph across the Anglosphere. Enjoy!

I am intrigued by the constant literary allusions I keep finding concerning the puritanical basis of much contemporary Western European culture and civilization, with especial reference to the Protestant Anglo-Saxon strain of Western-derived social organization in particular. Richard Posner, a law professor at the University of Chicago, has written a fascinating book called Sex and Reason. The central thesis of the book gravitates around the subject of how the modern conceptualization of human sexuality can be fully integrated within both a jurisprudential and economic framework. However, Posner also manages to meticulously explore why many of the societies of the ancient past, such as Greece and Rome, as well as many existing Third World and Catholic Mediterranean societies, that happen to be very “machista” in both social atmosphere and tone, tend to be much more liberal towards human sexual expression than either their corresponding Western European complement in general or their Anglo-Saxon equivalent in particular.

Mr Posner’s understanding of the rigid nature of the prevailing Calvinist morality that undergirds the fundamental structure of the contemporary social institutions of the Anglo-Saxon world rests on a distinction he draws between companionate and non-companionate marriage. He defines companionate marriage as being a genuine partnership between husband and wife supposedly based on mutual love and respect, with both spouses expected to participate equally in the daily operation of the household economy. It is chiefly distinguished from noncompanionate marriage by the fact that male-female relations are no longer exclusively organized around the male need for sexual release or the assurance of paternity and patrilineal inheritance. In his book, Posner writes:

Companionate marriage fosters puritanical attitudes generally, so we should not be surprised by the puritanical strain in the Anglo-American sexual culture. A husband’s adultery becomes for the first time offensive , because it undermines love and trust and reduces the amount of time that he spends with his wife, which are elements of companionate but not of noncompanionate marriage. The patronizing of prostitutes by married men is a form of adultery, and so also becomes offensive. Moreover, as a male-female relationship signally lacking in love and trust – a relationship characterized, indeed, by the impersonality of the spot market – prostitution is incongruous in a society that has turned its back on the businesslike model of noncompanionate marriage. But because prostitution is a substitute for forms of extramarital sex that are more threatening to companionate marriage, and thus is a complement to as well as a substitute for such marriage, the effect of a social commitment to companionate marriage is not to condemn outright but to problematize what in a society of noncompanionate marriage would be an unproblematic institution. (Posner, 158)

Posner generally attributes the puritanical undercurrents of modern Anglo-Saxon culture to the rise of companionate marriage during the sixteenth century. This is brought about through the advent of a nascent Western capitalism and the English version of the Lutheran Reformation. It stands in sharp bas-relief to the more traditional noncompanionate forms of marriage which had previously dominated all of the societies of classical antiquity and other non-Western cultures before the advent of European exploration and colonization. As an interesting sidebar, it seems that wherever the shadow of the Pax Britannia fell, so fell the rigidly puritanical values it brought with it.

Consistent with this, many previous scholars and ethnographers once argued that the culture of the Indian sub-continent was positively licentious. As a matter of fact, pre-Mughal Indian culture was characterized by having a highly sexualized body of erotic literature (such as the Kama Sutra) and many of its most sacred temple complexes were decorated in a rich pornographic imagery. After the eighteenth century introduction of the British Raj, the East India Company, and the legions of evangelizing Christian missionaries who came trailing behind from the rear, the Indians became even more fanatically puritanical than the traditionally more repressed Englishman.

Maybe we should also be looking at the notion of the Protestant Work Ethic developed by German sociologist Max Weber. It is evident that much of the socially conservative, morally puritanical underpinnings of Anglo-American civilization (the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand) come from the rigid Calvinist morality preached by the first English pilgrims settling the New World. The reformer John Calvin, the theological idol of the first Puritans, did stress the value of hard work and the full completion of those religious tasks mandated by God as a means of determining who ultimately numbered amongst “the predestined Elect.”

Additionally, the only way any of the believers could be certain of his salvation was on the basis of how much wealth he had accumulated throughout an entire lifetime, eventually culminating in the “time is money” mantra of modern Western capitalism (secularized Calvinist morality). Thus, those who were either financially impoverished or deviated from the average code of conduct prescribed by Calvin and personally exemplified by many a Puritan believer, were regarded as social outcastes condemned to an eternity of hellfire and suffering.